La Jolla Symphony

One of the things you immediately discover about composer Yiheng Yvonne Wu is she has a high regard for honesty. It’s important enough that she followed up a lengthy face-to-face discussion about her music with an email clarifying exactly what she meant by “honesty”:

“Art that strikes me as honest is art that attempts to engage with something ‘true’ to the human experience,” wrote Wu, whose “Transcriptions of Place” will be premiered by the La Jolla Symphony Saturday and Sunday at UC San Diego.

“Of course there is no single ‘truth,’ but an artist’s commitment to his/her subjectivity is part of what makes the work honest: it commits to a personal truth. It is one humble attempt to grapple with the larger thing that is shared human experience.

“Powerful moments in art, for me, come from recognizing this kind of honesty. (Exactly how the articulation of ‘personal truth’ happens in music is hard to say, but ‘honesty’ is an attitude. It’s an endeavor that motivates me.)”

Wu, who was born in Taiwan, raised in Virgina, and now lives in San Diego with her husband, artist Karl Pilato, has always aspired to be honest, especially with herself.

While a high-achieving high school senior aiming toward a career in science, she took some college classes in chemistry at William and Mary, but something didn’t feel right.

“About a month into that school year, I realized I didn’t care enough about science,” she said. “I was doing really well; I even got a top score on the first exam but it totally just hit one day — wow, I don’t have the passion for this.”

She also played piano, so she decided to fill out her schedule with a music composition class at William and Mary, “just for fun.” But it was that experience that kindled her passion. She realized, in all honesty, she wanted to be a composer.

“I felt then, as I do now: music is challenging in the best possible way,” Wu said. “It’s worthy of a lifetime of commitment, meaning it’s so deeply interesting you can never be done with understanding it.”

Still, she had to be sure, especially about being a composer. So after graduating from Yale with a music degree, she spent six years teaching piano while she considered whether she wanted to pursue composing.

She wanted to be honest about it: Was composing a necessity or was it just another option?

“I loved teaching and teaching piano brings a lot of joy,” she said. “It’s such a privilege to teach one on one and I mostly teach young children.

“But I did learn that teachers are obliged to keep their own fire going and that ultimately, doing creative work is the best way for me to engage with music — to really sink my teach into music and not to sit back and just do what’s easy.”

Aesthetic fit

When she realized she had to compose, she looked for graduate programs that would be an “aesthetic fit” and choose UC San Diego, where she found a kindred spirit in faculty composer Katharina Rosenberger.

“She’s always listening to my music, even silently,” Wu said. “When I bring in a score in progress, she’ll sit and listen to it in real time. And she reacts from her gut, which I really like. She’s feeling the music so she’s been really great at reminding me to more fully craft the musical shape of my ideas.”

As significantly, Rosenberger is sensitive to what Wu calls the “choreography of energies” in her music.

“(We believe) that every musical idea has an energy, that it’s alive, and it’s going somewhere or it’s becoming something,” Wu said. “That’s a big part of how she experiences my work and that’s very helpful.”

It’s also important to Wu that like Rosenberger, her musical ideas are multidimensional, allowing listeners to take varying perspectives when hearing her work. That element in particular appealed to La Jolla Symphony conductor and UC San Diego faculty member Steven Schick, who awarded Wu the orchestra’s annual Nee Commission.

“Her music is both small and large at the same time,” Schick said in an email exchange. “She works in these beautifully colored little gestures, but the sum of it seems to resonate in a big space.”

Despite the high regard she holds among her peers and music department faculty, Wu has to be honest about her future: she has no grand plans as far as her “career” as a composer is concerned. And she quietly continues to teach piano.

“Don’t tell my adviser this, but I’m not concerned with having an international career,” Wu said. “I’m not doing it for that. I’m doing it because as I said earlier, it’s something worthy of my time. And I guess I’m the kind of person who does need unending projects.

“To engage in work that I could finish every day might be frightening. But to engage in work that’s never done is actually comforting. Because there’s always more to do. There’s always more to get better at. And there’s always more to discover, about yourself and the thing you are working at.”